Category Archives: Technology

As I said in Part I of this post, hangers-on do one thing — they hang on. So in the aftermath of my late-June post, Is ‘Iterating Grace’ re-iterating ‘Milwaukee’?, I continued to check Twitter for mention of either “iterating grace” or #iteratinggrace. This was definitely FOMO-ish, but my co-hanger-on, Teddy Roland (@teddyroland), and I had invested more time than probably anyone (everyone?) else on the planet in trying to figure out who had created the phenomenon that was Iterating Grace (IG). So it was easy to rationalize just a bit more time every day or two or three.

If you arrived here from the link in Charley Locke’s December 6th Wired article, I encourage you to begin with Part II instead. Really. Stop. Koons will be much more gratified if you read about the book in Part II (and links therein) than about boring Twitter analytics, which is what you will get if you continue below. Really. Go to Part II.

Consider an evening in New York City in late September 2013. Two men and a woman are in the Brooklyn apartment of one of the men, or more likely in her pied-à-terre in Manhattan. Or perhaps nowhere, since I am hypothesizing about this gathering, not recounting. They are reviewing the events of the day, which saw the culmination of a project that the men had begun five years before and of which the woman had learned only a little less than a year earlier. Her subsequent role had been solely as observer and recorder of events, until this morning, when she became a minor participant as well.

When I wrote my first three posts on bitly (as “bit.ly”) nearly five years ago, they offered a serious-yet-humorous attempt to answer a simple question: Given that bitly’s shortened URLs were only 6-character strings and given the effort by 301Works (through the Internet Archive) to preserve those “mappings,” how long would it be before bitly ran out of strings? My assumption-dependent answer back then — roughly the year 2030 — is now as irrelevant as 301Works seems to be invisible, but you can find the third post here with backlinks to the first two: “Soooo big!” Counting on bit.ly, Part III.